Life
Robert Stone was born in Brooklyn, New York. Until the age of six he was raised by his mother, who suffered from schizophrenia; after she was institutionalized, he spent several years in a Catholic orphanage. In his short story "Absence of Mercy", which he has called autobiographical, the protagonist Mackay is placed at age five in an orphanage described as having had "the social dynamic of a coral reef".
Stone dropped out of high school in 1954 and joined the Navy for four years, where he worked as a journalist. In the early 1960s, he briefly attended New York University; worked as a copyboy at the New York Daily News; married and moved to New Orleans; and attended the Wallace Stegner workshop at Stanford University, where he began writing a novel. Although he met the influential Beat Generation writer Ken Kesey and other Merry Pranksters, he was not a passenger on the famous 1964 bus trip to New York, contrary to some media reports. Living in New York at the time, he met the bus on its arrival and accompanied Kesey to an "after-bus party" whose attendees included a dyspeptic Jack Kerouac.
Stone has taught in the creative writing program at Yale University. For the 2010-2011 school year, he has been the Endowed Chair in the English Department at Texas State University-San Marcos.
Read more about this topic: Robert Stone (novelist)
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“But it is a cold, lifeless business when you go to the shops to buy something, which does not represent your life and talent, but a goldsmith’s.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“There is a period near the beginning of every man’s life when he has little to cling to except his unmanageable dream, little to support him except good health, and nowhere to go but all over the place.”
—E.B. (Elwyn Brooks)
“Have a care over my people. You have my people—do you that which I ought to do. They are my people.... See unto them—see unto them, for they are my charge.... I care not for myself; my life is not dear to me. My care is for my people. I pray God, whoever succeedeth me, be as careful of them as I am.”
—Elizabeth I (1533–1603)